New Hampshire Indoor State Championships livestream and previews (via N.H. Track and Field)
Two boys will get separate shots at the 30-year-old state record in the 1,000 meters what could have been a one-in-a-thousand state-championship race
The 2024 New Hampshire High School Indoor Track and Field Championships take place today at Plymouth State College. Division 2 events should start at 9:30 a.m. Eastern Time, while Division I action is slated to begin at 4:30 p.m.
New Hampshire Track and Field has posted previews for Division 2 and Division 1. The girls’ and boys’ entry lists for D-2 and the girls’ and boys’ entry lists for D-1 double as a rough schedule of events and a set of clues as to who might win or place high in each event. This is not an innovative procedural format, but in the event I’m able to lure anyone with no ties to New Hampshire into watching the livestreams, this information will quickly orient any Granite State-agnostic to what they’re watching and make things more interesting. At least this has been my own experience when watching stochastically selected U.S. high-school state meets online.
The folks who operate New Hampshire Track and Field have integrated the in-state results of the state’s high-school athletes with TFRRS to create a rankings system for Granite State preps. You can consult this data at your leisure to complement the heat sheets and your real-time, delayed, or eternally and politely declined viewing. Be advised, however, that this list only includes performances run within New Hampshire. Results recorded in open-meet competitions on any of the nearby fast tracks in and around Boston count toward state-meet seedings.
As a marquee distance-race feature of the day, New Hampshire has two boys ranked within the top ten in the country in the 1,000 meters. Unfortunately, however, Bedford High School is a D-1 and school and Coe-Brown Academy a D-2 school, so there will be no Jacob Redman-Jamie Lano matchup in this event today.
This unavoidable mutual snub would tragic enough under literally any circumstances, but it’s especially devastating given that the state record of 2:27.38, set by Conant’s Zak Wright in 1994, is among the most respected on the books owing to its vintage alone. And Wright absolutely shattered whatever the record was then—it may still have been the 2:33.9 I had watched my Concord teammate Chris Basha run six years earlier.
I believe that Wright ran his mark inside Dartmouth College’s Leverone Field House on what was then a flat 200-meter track, recently renovated from the flat 220-yard track on which I and Basha competed at the 1988 New Hampshire state meet. Wright definitely competed in that 1,000 meters without meaningful competition, just as both Redman and Lano (who will be doubling back after the 3,000 meters) will do today on PSU’s unbaked oval. And both Redman and Lano ran their personal bests on Phillips Exeter Academy’s flat 200-meter track in solo efforts on different weekends, so while the conditions underfoot today won’t feature any Boston University- or The (New Balance) Track-caliber engineering magic, at least they won’t involve the University of New Hampshire’s 160-meter banked paper-clip.
Embedded below are the YouTube livestreams of the D-2 and D-1 meets today, provided free of charge by New Hampshire Track and Field and its sponsors, and a video of the 1988 state meet that includes footage of me running in the 3,000 meters (around 12:00 into the video) and Basha setting the state record in the 1,000 meters after going through the first 200 meters in around 27.5 seconds. As I detailed six years ago at this time, there was only one indoor state championship meet for boys and one for girls in the days of mullets, heavy metal, and acid-washed jeans, since at the time New Hampshire could conduct a census using a single Texas Instruments calculator with a failing battery.